Lady Charlotte Bury (eBook)

This is the first biography of Lady Charlotte Bury (1775–1861), novelist and celebrated beauty who listed Sir Walter Scott and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis among her admirers. Born the youngest daughter of John Campbell, 5th Duke of Argyll, and his wife Elizabeth, née Gunning, she married twice for love, gave birth to eleven children, served as lady-in-waiting to Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, travelled extensively and wrote twenty ‘silver-fork’ novels as well as collections of poetry. Her fictional characters explore the ways in which perceptions of women in literature and society were undergoing rapid change—a process of which she herself, like her contemporary, Jane Austen, was a catalyst.

Though considered in her lifetime one of the foremost female novelists of her generation, Bury gained notoriety as the suspected author of the scandalous Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV, published anonymously in 1838; it overshadowed her legacy and by the turn of the century her work had been largely forgotten. This biography addresses this loss, rediscovering Bury’s remarkable life of privilege and struggle, success and shame, and of literature, love and high society.